index

Open Thread: I Get It Now!

I have always been confused by Carly Simon's song "You're So Vain", as the lyrics seemed contradictory to me. As you will no doubt remember, the song goes:

You're so vain, you probably think this song is about you.

This always confused me because the song is about him, and surely him recognizing it as such wouldn't be a symptom of vanity so much as awareness of the identifying details in the song (apricot scarves, horses, etc.). (This is, of course, assuming that the identifying details are genuine and not made up -- if they are made up and he still recognizes the song as about him, that still strikes me as a kind of awareness, just not the same kind.)

However! I finally realized tonight that the trick lies in seeing that the song may be "about" him, but it is not "About" him. Capital-About. The song is About her hurt and pain after being abused by him, and her disgust at his own ego and self-importance. For him to miss all that and just think the song is about himself, his apricot scarf, his horse, his incredible awesomeness, and -- oh yeah -- some girl he dated, is to totally miss the forest for all those pretty trees.

45
comments:

I always assumed the details were supposed to be vague enough to refer to more than one person, in that "Those people are talking about someone who wears shirts? I wear shirts!" way. 'Apricot scarves' does seem a bit precise, but I figured the idea was to see how hard your brain would try to twist things in order to justify believing that the song (or any of the other real-world things it represents) are referring to you.

This is also an excellent idea, though, and in a way makes much more sense.

---

What I find interesting is when I get a clear reading of the 'meaning' of a song that others find entirely baffling. Anyone who has checked out my blog's avant-garde About page knows that, after a quarter-century of wondering how anyone could possibly choose, I do in fact have a Favourite Song, namely The Great Collapse by Vancouver band The Zolas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xw02vD2Hp3A

It is pretty clear (to me) that this song is about someone moving on from a breakup, and dreaming about an End Of The World scenario in which the singer and their ex are two of the heroic lone survivors in the brave new world that follows. The singer interprets this dream as commentary on the impermanence of everything, and realises that while they have no such heroic romantic future with this person, the time they had together is not meaningless and the memories (even the memories of old daydreams of things that hadn't happened yet) are still good and worthy, as long as they don't keep you from moving on with your life.

But I say this to people and they just look at me funny. Plainly they have not listened to the song enough times; we should listen to it three or four dozen more times and maybe it will become clear to them; get back here and sit down, consarnit!

Or rather (correcting my last sentence in the first section), while the 'how hard will your mind twist in order to believe that this song is about you' interpretation is probably true, the interpretation you (Ana) give is probably also true and makes the song work on multiple levels.

I have heard that Carly Simon once auctioned off the rights to be told who the song is about.

I'm not good at detecting non-obvious song meanings. Several times I've accidentally stumbled across Wikipedia articles talking about what songs are about, and being surprised in a "Well, now that I look at it like that..." way. (They always seem to be Genesis songs, for some reason. "Anything She Does" is about porn! "Domino" is about nuclear war! "Home by the Sea" is about a haunted house! "Keep it Dark" is about a guy who was abducted by aliens*!)

There was also the time I had a bit of tune with no words attached in my head for...about half my life**? Then, at my brother's eleventh birthday party, I heard it on the bowling alley radio...and couldn't make out any lyrics to Google. I expressed my frustration at being so close, yet so far, and Mom was like "Oh, that? That's 'I'm Blue'." I was so happy to finally know what it was, I didn't care that I lost the game.

*That one was quite recent. I was reading Mark Reads Lord of the Rings and Merry said "I can't keep it dark any longer!" and I thought Hang on, is this some British idiom? Clearly, this is a job for Wikipedia! (Except that it wasn't, because I found nothing about idioms.)

**Even that might not get across just how long ~8 years is to a fifteen-year-old.

I had to sit my partner down once and explain to him that in 80s songs (and some 90s for that matter), "dancing" meant sex. A whole world of hidden meanings opened up for him, such as these classic Madonna lines:" Only when I'm dancing can I feel this free /at night, I lock the door, where no-one else can see / I'm tired of dancing here all by myself / tonight, I want to dance with someone else!"

I think it was when "Dancing in the Dark" came out that it came up, actually... (Dev, not Gaga)

Ana, I like your explanation because I have spent much of my life thinking, "Of course he does, it's obviously about him."

Will, "you flew your Learjet up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun," seems kind of specific to me.

-

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant tells the story of two lovers who got together in high school got married and then saw their marriage collapse. It tells it with a frame story of two people meeting after a long time away and one of them filling the other one in the details he knows.

The details he knows section ends with, "And that's all I know about Brenda and Eddie, I can't tell you more cause I told you already," indicating that the end of the story, as told, is incomplete because it ends in the past, where the story as indicated in the song ends in the present, "Here we are wavin' Brenda and Eddie goodbye." When last we saw them they got a divorce and they were separate. Now we've got that line and that line has significance. It calls back to a part of the story in the past, "There were were wavin' Brenda and Eddie goodbye," was when they got married and went off to their apartment with deep pile carpets and a couple of paintings from Sears.

It's the same line but brought into the here and now instead of the there and then. Did they get back together? Did the story get brought up because these two just got remarried? What the hell? I don't understand. Why is the marriage line repeated after finishing telling use that you lost track of the story after their divorce?

I'm not familiar with the song, but going strictly off of what you've provided, it sounds like a a parallel sentence with a different meaning in context -- that is, when they got married, "we were" literally and physically waving them goodbye as they left; now, "we are" figuratively waving them goodbye as a couple.

@chris-the-cynic -- Huh. I always assumed that the couple in the frame story *were* Brenda and Eddie. The middle section is told in the third person as sort of an info-dump, so the listener could understand the significance of the encounter in the restaurant.

Now if somebody could clear up "Don't Fear the Reaper" for me? Is it supposed to about suicide? Vampires? something else?

When I was quite young, I thought that the point of 'You're so vain' was that the chorus was directed at someone who wasn't the person mentioned in the verses... I think that may be a slightly convoluted way of thinking of it though :)

I like your explanation. I went out with someone who was a bit like that, in that I bet if I'd written something similar he'd be falling over himself to say that it was about him... A weirder mix of inferiority/superiority complex I have never known... he seemed to think that if I was sad, it was because he had upset me... if I told him that a man had been coming on to me and had made me feel uncomfortable, then he would actually say stuff like "oh, should I be jealous?" or even get angry at said creep because he perceived the act of coming onto me as a slight on him... (stepping onto his 'territory' perhaps?). It occurred to me later that possibly the cause of his jealousy was because he was that sort of creep himself.

Sigh. But if you're reading this, dear ex, I bet you think this post is about you.

As for songs that have baffled me, this bit of Patience (by Gilbert and Sullivan) has always made me wonder. It's nonsense, perhaps, but what precious nonsense! :)

I hear the soft note of the echoing voiceOf an old, old love long deadIt whispers my sorrowing heart 'rejoice!'For the last sad tear is shedThe pain that is all but a pleasure will changeFor the pleasure that's all but painAnd never, oh never, our hearts shall rangeFrom that old, old love again

I always thought that Don't Fear the Reaper was simply about telling someone that they shouldn't fear Death (personified as the Grim Reaper). "Seasons don't fear the Reaper, nor do the wind, the sun or the rain -- We can be like they are", that is, fearless because the soul, and love, is eternal.

In the last verse, the dying woman learns to accept Death and her soul flies to meet the Reaper, as a friend and not as something to be feared any longer.

I have been told that "Don't fear the Reaper" is just about generic death and love transcending it.

The figure given in the song was probably at least somewhat close to accurate when the song was written for deaths per day, it definitely doesn't apply to suicides per day or vamperifications per day.

That said, the lyrics aren't exactly clear on what it means.

-

Thinking back on it today, it did occur to me that it could be that the two people meeting in the restaurant were Brenda and Eddie but the way it stays as consistent direct address feels to me like it's maintaining the same speaker throughout. It doesn't feel to me like we have a point of view shift. We've definitely got musical styles switching, but the point of view felt consistent to me. Especially the way the middle section ends with the, "That's all I know about Brenda and Eddie, can't tell you more 'cause I told you already," which sort of feels like one side of a conversation formed into song lyrics which is very much how the catching up at the beginning of the song felt to me.

It just feels to me like the side of the conversation we don't hear includes whatever got them onto the topic of Brenda and Eddie and something like, "Oh, come on, you must know more than that," between the "That's all I know about Brenda and Eddie," and "I can't tell you more 'cause I told you already."

Especially since the shift in music style makes sense for me as someone diving into a story after being asked a question.

I was pretty sure 40k men and women every day was a death statistic pulled from somewhere - one country? One war?

Pretty sure it's about a suicide pact, though, rather than just normal not fearing death. "Romeo and Juliet / are together in eternity / we can be like they are", "Came the last night of sadness / and it was clear we couldn't go on"... still a pretty song.

Will, "you flew your Learjet up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun," seems kind of specific to me.

Ohmigosh, do you think she knows about my Learjet?

(It may have been overly long since I heard the song in question.)

---

Now if somebody could clear up "Don't Fear the Reaper" for me? Is it supposed to about suicide? Vampires?

It sure seemed to me like it was about suicide, but apparently the writer insists it's about love transcending life and death. Which suggests to me that possibly he doesn't quite get Shakespeare as thoroughly as he thinks he does? (The wikipedia source on this references a website referencing a College Music Journal article from 1995, so I dunno.) It would help if we knew what the "forty thousand men and women every day" referred to. It's not suicide counts (at least according to the math at suicide dot org), as those are much, much lower, and it's not total deaths (much, much higher).

I kind of love the vampire idea, but I feel like it's vague enough to expand to other mythological immortal reapers. Henceforth, I shall maintain the conviction that Don't Fear The Reaper is a love song between a human woman and the Slenderman.

I'm pretty sure that the lyric is an attempt at the number of people who die globally in a day, It's not easy getting figures for 1976 but it looks to me that it's probably half as many as it should be based on some very imprecise math. Maybe closer to 40%.

Still, off by half, or even off by 60%, is a lot closer than the several thousand percent it would be off if it were an attempt to be the number of people who committed suicide in a given year.

I was once part of the women's chorus in a production of Patience (I was a Lovesick Maiden with a katana, which was less awesome than one might hope), and thought the lines made sense. All the women have just spent the entire play ignoring their old boyfriends and sighing after unavailable poets, resulting in misery for all, and now they've realized this was silly and the poet who started the whole thing is an attention-seeking jerk, so they're going back to their exes, who are delighted to see them again. The reference to the love being particularly old seems odd, and the men's hearts haven't done any ranging, but otherwise it works.

That was my explanation to my mother and our grocery clerk. I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees it like this. Personally, I've always been a bit amused at her expectation that not only would he think the song was about him, despite her cluing him and everyone else in, but that he wouldn't notice she was insulting him - the description's not exactly flattering, aside from the repeated "you're so vain."

Looking at that I wonder if it might have been, "40 million men and women every year," (which would be accurate rounding to the nearest million) and then a decision to drop it down to smaller things resulted in million becoming thousand and year becoming day without any thought to the fact that it doesn't actually work that way.

If the song really was intended to be about death as a whole and not just suicide I don't think that means that the writer didn't understand Shakespeare. Romeo and Juliet do, in fact, die in Shakespeare. So they fall within the bounds of the topic of the song. It might be better to have characters who died of old age or dragonfire, but off the top of my head I can think of no fictional lovers as famous as Romeo and Juliet who did.

I'm just tweaked when people use Romeo and Juliet as an archetype of transcendental eternal love, which is (possibly/probably) what the topic of the song is supposed to be. R&J are teenagers with tremendous hots for each other who make terrible decisions, and while I do think that irrational infatuation is actually a thing worth celebrating in its own way, the idea that their desire to enter into each others' pants is of a magnitude to set the standard of romance through the ages is vexing to me. They were lovers in the physiological sense, but not Great Lovers in the mythic sense. Choosing R&J distracts from the 'transcendental love' concept in favour of the 'suicide pact' concept, so if the writer's mind really was on the former to such a degree that he finds the latter repulsive, I'm not sure he thought this one through.

Your theory on 'Whoops, there are not 1000 days in a year but never mind that' seems extremely plausible, though.

One that I love, but have never really groked, is "Man Who Sold the World." (Dare I admit that I first met this song as a secret password in a Star Wars fanfic?) It's haunting, and sometimes I feel like I'm understanding a bit of what it means - sometimes it feels similar to "Viva la Vida," another song I really like; sometimes I wonder if he's addressing himself, or another person....

For "You're So Vain," my interpretation was always that the person she was talking about always thought he was the most important person ever, to the point of completely ignoring others (more through carelessness than malice), and that she didn't really expect him to understand how he had hurt her because he didn't have the capacity. I got the vibe that the pain was in the past, and now she was healing and able to look at the whole situation with a bit of black humor.

I'm just tweaked when people use Romeo and Juliet as an archetype of transcendental eternal love, which is (possibly/probably) what the topic of the song is supposed to be. R&J are teenagers with tremendous hots for each other who make terrible decisions, and while I do think that irrational infatuation is actually a thing worth celebrating in its own way, the idea that their desire to enter into each others' pants is of a magnitude to set the standard of romance through the ages is vexing to me.

I like Data's description in Q-In-Law (a TNG book, not an episode): "William Shakespeare's treatise on the subjects of parental neglect and teen suicide."

I always understood those verses in "You're So Vain" to be somewhat sarcastic. "You think *everything* is about you, so of course you'll think this song is about you, jerk." My personal experiences may have skewed my interpretation, though.

***I have lots of songs I don’t fully understand, but that’s because I listen to the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd: I suspect a fair number of those groups’ songs make perfect sense if you’re stoned. ;-p Also, what the hell is going on in Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown”? Is some dude named Sundown having an affair with the narrator’s girlfriend? ... Who names some innocent soul ‘Sundown’ or how does somebody get that as a nickname?

I always thought "Don't Fear the Reaper" was about suicide, possibly a double suicide. The lines about Romeo and Juliet being together in eternity suggested that to me, and so did the last verse about the presumed lover appearing and the woman going to him (I always assumed that she jumped out an apartment building window for some reason).

For purely random reasons, I thought the DFTR "40,000 men and women" thing was a Vietnam statistic. No idea why I thought that. I like Chris' hypothesis that it's a rounded number that was then ludicrously bent.

For a long time I didn't get "Free Fallin'" by Tom Petty, and it actually made me angry. I'd never really been the person to end a relationship (I was in high school/college), and didn't understand how he could say all those nice things about her but "not even miss her." I was like "if you hate yourself so much for leaving her, why did you do it?" It wasn't until I had to break off a bad relationship that I understood that bittersweet feeling of being sad that it didn't work out, but glad that it's over.

I had to sit my partner down once and explain to him that in 80s songs (and some 90s for that matter), "dancing" meant sex. A whole world of hidden meanings opened up for him

I had a similar experience with drug references as I got older. I would hear Captain Jack on my parent's Billy Joel tape when I was a kid and they forgot to fast-forward through it. For a while, I had a vague idea that it was about drugs, but it was a very long time before I really got half of the references in it.

One of the songs that totally baffles me from a band that usually has somewhat straightforward lyrics is Simon and Garfunkel's At the Zoo. "The monkeys stand for honesty / Giraffes are insincere / And the elephants are kindly / But they're dumb." Seriously, what?

Of course, I shouldn't talk because my favorite band (Manic Street Preachers, out of Wales) has some truly dense lyrics, packed with weird political and literary references. I had to sit down with a reference site to understand half of them when I first started listening to them.

I don't get all the references in Captain Jack, but I first listened to it when I was 10 or so, and it was very, very obviously about drugs. Although now we have excellent drugs-of-choice such as Jack Sparrow and Jack Harkness.

My parents always skipped Captain Jack. I didn't even realise it existed. I was thirteen or fourteen when I first listened to the CD on my own, which was more than old enough to get the gist. (Haven't listened to it since. I didn't like it very much.)

They also always fast-forwarded through the bit in Red Dwarf where newly-human Kryten talks about his new penis. Except when it was showing on TV, when they just muted it. (Or turned it off for a couple minutes, the time it was set to show captions when muted.)

Lonespark: Although now we have excellent drugs-of-choice such as Jack Sparrow and Jack Harkness.

There's a couple fragments of story floating around my head that seem related to this.

Also, what the hell is going on in Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown”? Is some dude named Sundown having an affair with the narrator’s girlfriend? ... Who names some innocent soul ‘Sundown’ or how does somebody get that as a nickname?

I always thought the narrator was being tempted by living near someone who is either a prostitute or very sexually open (or both). That does not explain the unusual name for said woman, though. Gordon Lightfoot isn't as bad as some folk musicians when it comes to "wait...what?" lyrics, but some of his songs do have those moments. Of course, the "wait...what?" lyrics seem to go along with painting vivid pictures in one's head, so I can't really complain. (See a not insignificant number of Dylan songs.)

Or we could both be completely wrong.

I should note that, regardless of what the songwriters' say, Hotel California will forever be about a haunted hotel to me, so I might not be the best person to weigh in on "what songs really mean."

I always thought the meaning of "You're so vain" was quite clear. She's singing a song about herself - her experience, a relationship she had, the things she learned from the relationship, etc. And the person she was in that relationship with was the sort who thought it was all abut them.

It's a bit like failing the Bechdel test, really. If a woman is talking, it must be about a man. If she's singing a song about a relationship, it must be about the man she was with, rather than the person she was and became as a result of the experience.

I can't think of songs that have gone over my head like that, but I CAN think of musical theater lyrics that drive me insane.

First is Wicked. In Defying Gravity, Elphaba says a few gems like, "Take a message back, from me!" and "Too long I've been afraid of loosing love I guess I've lost. Well if that's love, it comes at much to high a cost" Think about those for a minute. Just let it really sink in.

And then we have Frank Wildhorn. Oh, Frank Wildhorn. In Lestat, Claudia sings "I don't want their milk and honey, they can keep their fine herb teas." Cause herb teas are/were really fancy. Kind of like how in Fergie's Glamorous, the guy rapping makes a big deal about having a bunch of scones.

And then there's this lyric from The Scarlet Pimpernel. "God, when did man lose his reason. Save us, my God, if you're there. God, can you not feel the terror, like a fire in the air?" I always cringe, and I think that's why I mainly stick with When I Look at You, The Riddle, and Falcon in the Dive from that show. I mean, Hammerstein can rhyme "gin" with "gin" and it's fine. He's Oscar Hammerstein. Frank Wildhorn is not. . .

As for Romeo and Juliet, one of my old acting teachers says, "The greatest love story ever told, and they're only in 4 or 5 scenes together, and in two of those, at least one of them is dead."

My favorite take on it is in "Reefer Madness: The Musical" where they sing a song about Romeo and Juliet (titled the same) and even state that they haven't finished the book in English class yet. Thing sing about how Romeo and Juliet probably got married, and had a ton of kids, and everyone loved each other. Meanwhile, the spirit of Shakespeare keeps popping trying to correct them, but they just ignore him.

In an interesting reflection on two responses here, "Sundown" was my "haunting melody of which I don't know the words" for years and years. I would forget it for a while, then it would come back to me--with difficulty, because I normally can only remember tunes by remembering the lyrics. I identified it with the broken melody that haunts the protagonist of Piers Anthony's _Cthon_ (is that obscure or what?) Then one day I finally heard the whole thing with lyrics, so now I can remember it whenever I want--but it's not quite as haunting.

I always took Sundown to be the woman's epithet--she's a woman of the night. He wants to leave her, but has trouble doing so: he's simultaneously attracted and repelled. He sees her as a vice, not good for him, but too addictive to let go. It's similar to "Maggie". (Suzanne Vega's "Maggie May," which she said at a concert was written in response, is an interesting song in this context too.)

The one that drives me crazy for not making sense (as opposed to because I can't pick up the words, which is a common problem--"Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", anyone?) is "Careless Whispers." Who did what to whom? I can't find any assignment of the pronouns that makes a story for me.

as opposed to because I can't pick up the words, which is a common problem--Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

I was going to mention that problem too, but then forgot in my comment! For years, I thought that the line "You can't plant me in your penthouse" was "You can't keep me as your pen pal." Which I still think makes sense - he's going for a complete break - but is apparently completely wrong. Appropriately, I'm listening to that album right now.

I love the way in "Reefer Madness" they always pronounce it "Romeo AND Juliet". And the song is wonderful. Then again, pretty much all of "Reefer Madness: The Musical" is awesome. There are one or two bits I quibble with, but it's really, really good.

I always wanted to show it to my ninth graders--the "Romeo and Juliet" song--but they might have wanted to see the rest of the show.

I blame this thread for the fact that I have the same verse of "At the Zoo" on repeat in my head.

-

Switching songs, I always figured sundown was the time of day, as in, "Come sundown, [statement]." Creeping tends to happen in the dark, retribution tends to happen in the dark, and references to sundown are all tied to the possibility of being caught creeping.

Wikipedia thinks it might be about a woman named Cathy Smith and has this to say about it on her page:In a 1975 interview, Lightfoot expanded upon Sundown and hinted at the worry he experienced in his relationship with Smith:"All it is, is a thought about a situation where someone is wondering what his loved one is doing at the moment. He doesn't quite know where she is. He's not ready to give up on her, either, and that's about all I got to say about that."

Lightfoot gave another insight into his relationship with Smith in a 2000 interview when he remarked upon "Sundown" being:"a back-alley kind of tune. It's based on infidelity -- I've seen both sides of that."

In 2008, Lightfoot gave an interview confirming that "Sundown" was written with his then-girlfriend in mind:"I think my girlfriend was out with her friends one night at a bar while I was at home writing songs. I thought, 'I wonder what she’s doing with her friends at that bar!' It’s that kind of a feeling. 'Where is my true love tonight? What is my true love doing?'

Post a Comment

Welcome to Ramblings!

Welcome to Ramblings, a progressive feminist blog about books, movies, pop culture, and their intersection with social justice. Please note that the comment policy is required reading before commenting.